Roll-to-Roll Processing OLEDs And Video Wallpaper

Roll-to-roll processing, a new way to manufacture OLEDs, could lead to that holy grail of screens, video wallpaper. Much easier to install than the fabled parlor walls from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, paper-thin OLEDs might light the way into the future.

Anil Duggal, Advanced Technology Leader for Organic Electronics at GE Global Research in Schenectady, New York, is leading a team in the creation of lighting wallpaper. Duggal says "We want all offices and homes to have this very flexible light source. When I say flexible, I mean a mechanically flexible light source that you can just paste wherever you want it and turn it on."

This idea is similar to the illuminum tiles used for illumination in Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon.

The OLEDs printed so far are also tunable, meaning that you can have different colored patches of light depending on your needs. And with roll-to-roll manufacturing, a process which would allow the printing of large OLED sheets on conventional printing presses used to coat plastics, the cost of large OLED sheet would go down by a factor of ten over anything available now.

So far, lighting wallpaper is pretty much an art project fantasy. Artist Jonas Samson created an interesting vision of what this could look like - see Light-Emitting Wallpaper for a peek.

Duggal and his team plan to introduce their first products in 2010, so stay tuned.